On Localization of Sources of Hazards Using Search Agents

Localization of sources of hazardous phenomena such as gas leakages in air and oil spells in seawater is of high importance for environmental and civil protection. In this paper, we study variations of bio-inspired search and man-developed search methods that can be used to find (localize) the sources of the hazardous phenomena. We use two main quality measure factors for our comparison; namely, the success rate, which is the probability of finding the source location correctly and the number of steps which is steps (time) taken by the searcher till it declares the source found. This work aims to be the basis of future research in this important domain. The results show that the gradient-climbing and biased random walk algorithms had the highest success rate at 81.1% and 85.4% respectively, followed by the random walk algorithm at a success rate of 70.9%.